As business declined in the 1970s, Milwaukee Road’s managers put locomotives into storage at yards all over the system. The extreme perspective of a fisheye lens takes in more than twenty stored diesels in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1980 at another railroad’s facility. This yard belonged to the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. That same year, these two railroads made the two largest trackage abandonments in U.S. history.
A westbound freight train descends the 1.7-percent grade through Idaho’s Bitterroot Mountains in September of 1979. Opened in December of 1908 with the completion of the 1.66-mile tunnel beneath St. Paul Pass, this part of the railroad was electrified from 1915 to 1974. The last train would run less than six months after Abbey made this photograph, during the inspection trip with bankruptcy trustee Richard B. Ogilvie. In 2001, the “Route of the Hiawathas” biking and hiking trail officially opened on the railroad grade, including the summit tunnel.
Westbound freight train at Haugan, Montana, viewed from over the shoulder of Abbey’s pipe-smoking driver in September of 1979. They were both on an inspection tour with federal bankruptcy Trustee Richard B. Ogilvie, a former Illinois governor, who wanted to make personally sure of his abandonment recommendation for the Pacific Extension, and an embargo effective March 1, 1980. The inspection party traveled east from Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, to Roundup, Montana, mostly on the railroad in a Chevrolet Suburban outfitted as a hi-rail vehicle.
Travelers in Cincinnati Union Terminal appear as silhouettes behind the east-facing windows of the rotunda. The Art Deco icon opened in 1933 and at its peak in the mid-1940s hosted 108 arriving and departing trains on seven different railroads. Business was still strong when Abbey visited in September of 1952, on assignment for what might be his best-illustrated article for Trains, “Temple of Transportation” in the May 1953 issue.
EPILOGUE
WALLACE W. ABBEY’S PHOTOGRAPHY RECEIVED A FRESH appraisal as the entire genre of railroad photography became the subject of deeper study. In 2003, the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society honored Abbey with its prestigious Fred A. and Jane R. Stindt Photography Award. In 2008, his haunting photograph of the redcap was included in a Trains magazine special publication, 100 Greatest Railroad Photos. That Cincinnati photo was emblematic of Abbey’s greatness, said Robert S. McGonigal, editor of Classic Trains magazine, in a 2017 interview. “Those CUT photos, made during the golden age of photojournalism, rank among the best of the genre. They make us weep, for the world they depict would soon vanish.”
One person who recognized Abbey’s importance was John Gruber, who in 1997 founded the Center for Railroad Photography & Art, based in Madison, Wisconsin. Gruber is himself an influential railroad photographer, with an extensive oeuvre showcased in dozens of railroad publications. His interest in finding a home for Abbey’s archive coincided with a story he wrote about the photographer for Classic Trains.
“My first impressions of the importance of his photography came from seeing his pictures taken while he was employed by mainline railroads and during the years he operated his own public relations business,” said Gruber. “Since I had visited Wally at his office at the Milwaukee Road in Chicago and at his home in Pueblo, I knew him personally. I had written about his lifetime achievement award for photography given by the R&LHS. So it seemed only natural to approach Wally and his family about preserving his collection at the Center. Gratefully, after discussions, they said yes.” Thus, in 2010, Abbey’s entire collection of 25,000 black-and-white negatives and 10,000 color slides found a permanent home, to be preserved and curated for generations to come.
Scott Lothes, the Center’s executive director since 2011, reviewed every one of Abbey’s 25,000 negatives while selecting the photographs for this book. Laborious as the process was, it was another, perhaps deeper, way to appreciate Abbey’s work.
“A true journalist, Abbey was at his best when people were in front of his lens,” Lothes says. “From operators at out-of-the-way signal towers to passengers in big-city terminals, Abbey had a true gift for evoking the human drama of railroading. At this, in the history of railroad photography, he has had few peers—and, I would argue, no superiors. It is a privilege for the Center to be the custodians of his remarkable collection.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
RAILROADING IS AMONG THE MODERN WORLD’S MOST transformative technologies, but much of its work happens behind the scenes and out of the public eye. We might wave at the engineers and conductors in the locomotives, yet we rarely—if ever—see the dispatchers, track workers, mechanics, and the host of others who keep the trains running. One of the strengths of Wallace W. Abbey’s photography is how he illuminated so many of these rarely seen aspects. Like railroading, archiving photographs and publishing books about them require the work of many people, most of whose efforts go unseen. Here we will illuminate as many as we can.
First and foremost is Abbey himself. Beyond creating a body of photography so richly deserving of a monograph, Abbey also left behind the documentation necessary for a book about his life’s work. He recorded meticulous notes about many of his photographs, especially his earlier images. Almost as importantly, he kept detailed records and journals about his career—without which, constructing the narrative for this volume would not have been possible. Photographers, take heed!
Speaking of the possible, so much of what’s in this book is the result of the enthusiastic participation of Abbey’s daughters, Mary (Maggie) Abbey and Martha Abbey Miller. Over the years, Abbey created an unusually rich and detailed archive of personal papers—letters, memoirs, speeches, “to-do” lists—all of which were made available to us by Maggie and Martha. We couldn’t have done this book without their help, but more than that, our correspondence with them turned the book into a warmly shared experience.
They also delighted us in bringing out aspects of their father’s life beyond railroading. One thing we learned is that Wally’s interest in railroads wasn’t an overriding presence in family life. Instead, more often the topic was music, and specifically their dad’s love of traditional country & western and Western swing. “It was really Dad’s other enthusiasm,” says Maggie. “We grew up surrounded by records, and he had quite a collection of CDs and old 78s in Pueblo.” She recalled this telling moment: “A year or so before he passed away, the music therapist at his assisted living facility asked me if he had perfect pitch. I had no idea, but she said she had been tuning her guitar near where he was sitting and he kept shaking his head and grimacing … until she apparently got it right, and then he gave her a thumbs-up and a smile.”
Finding a long-term home for Abbey’s photography was also a family matter. John Gruber founded the Center for Railroad Photography & Art in 1997, with preserving significant images of railroading a core initiative. Recognizing the importance of Abbey’s work, Gruber drew on the strength of his relationship with the photographer and the strength of the Center’s work to arrange for the family to donate the collection to the Center.
From its early days, the Center has partnered with Lake Forest College, 30 miles north of Chicago, on archival work. While the Center performs much of its archival work in-house, the Archives and Special Collections of the Lake Forest College Library did the heavy lifting for the 25,000 black-and-white negatives in the Abbey Collection. That included rehousing the negatives into archival-safe pages and binders, scanning them, and digitizing all of the caption information and other metadata. The project spanned the tenures of two archivists, Arthur Miller and Anne Thomason, both of whom deserve a great deal of gratitude. Several interns put hundreds of hours into processing the Abbey Collection, including Harris Miller, and, more recently, Jim Cascino and Colleen O’Keefe. The latter two are graduates of archiving master’s degree programs, and their expertise and professionalism were invaluable in the latter stages of the processing work.
In the middle of processing the Abbey Collection, the Center had the great fortune of hiring its second full-time employee, Jordan Radke,
who served as archives manager through 2017. Radke solved a lingering issue of the Abbey Collection by reorganizing the entire collection—an exceptional measure in the archives world, but one necessitated by Abbey’s use of three different organizational schemes for his photography that were not fully compatible with one another.
Trains magazine, Abbey’s one-time employer, selected the Center for their 2010 Preservation Award, a $10,000 grant that provided the initial resources to begin such high-caliber archiving of such a large collection. The editorial staff members at Trains and sister publication Classic Trains were great resources throughout the project, and Diane Laska-Swanke, Rob McGonigal, Brian Schmidt, and Jim Wrinn deserve special thanks for their great help in supplying missing caption information and answering other questions.
Indiana University Press deserves the gratitude of anyone interested in trains or railroading for becoming a guiding light of railroad publishing. This book would not have been possible without their interest and dedication. Thanks go to everyone on their staff, and especially to Sarah Jacobi and Ashley Runyon for their roles in this project.
We called on several of the Center’s members and friends to help pinpoint unidentified photographs and check facts. Time and again they impressed us with their knowledge and generous lending of it. Those include Nick Benson, Marc Entze, Fred Frailey, John Kelly, Blair Kooistra, Rob Leachman, John Lucas, John Luecke, Joe McMillan, and Joe Swanson. Each of the Center’s members contributed to the success of this project by supporting the Center. We thank each of them, and especially our board of directors for their guidance. Al Louer, in particular, encouraged our efforts. The Center is fortunate to garner the support of several foundations, and two of them, the Candelaria Fund and the Tom E. Dailey Foundation, support our archiving work directly.
Special thanks—of the kind that words cannot sufficiently convey—go to Bon French, who chairs the Center’s board of directors. Bon’s extraordinary generosity has enabled the institutionalization of the Center, including an endowment to ensure the long-term care and availability of such one-of-a-kind resources as the Abbey Collection. Bon’s deep knowledge of the railroad industry, particularly in his native Illinois, also helped resolve questions about the locations and subjects of many of the photographs that appear in these pages.
The Wallace W. Abbey Collection is one of many in the Center’s Railroad Heritage Visual Archive, which numbers more than 200,000 photographs. The Center is a not-for-profit arts and education organization whose mission is to preserve and present significant images of railroading. In addition to collecting and publishing, other activities include producing traveling exhibitions, hosting conferences and other events, and sponsoring an annual awards program. Learn more at www.railphoto-art.org.
As representatives of the Center, the authors are deeply grateful for the assistance of all the aforementioned people. We also acknowledge that any errors of fact or interpretation are ours alone.
—Kevin P. Keefe and Scott Lothes, Madison, Wisconsin, January 2018
Note: Photographs, unless otherwise noted, by Wallace W. Abbey, Collection of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art, www.railphoto-art.org
Cabooses bring up the rear of Milwaukee Road and Illinois Central freight trains at Forreston, Illinois, in the summer of 1957.
INDEX
The page numbers in Index represents the print page number and will differ with the eBook page numbers
Abbey, Margaret Squier
Abbey, Martha Jewett; death
Abbey, Wallace W., II
Abbey, Wallace W., III (biographical and personal material): Abbey Enterprises; at Association of American Railroads; at Association of Western Railways; at C&NW; at CB&Q; childhood in Chicago; Class By Itself; daughters Mary and Martha; death; Evanston Township High School; Fred A. & Jane R. Stindt Photography Award; influence on photography; Interstate Commerce Commission activities; Little Jewel, The; love of music; marriage to Martha Jewett; at Milwaukee Road; photography, early; railroad summer jobs; at Railway Age; at Santa Fe’s 21st Street Shop; self-portrait; at Soo Line; “Super Railroad” story; at Trains magazine
Algren, Nelson
Akin, Bill
Amtrak: Empire Builder at Minneapolis
Anderson, Willard V.
Association of American Railroads: Transportation Technology Center
Association of Western Railways
Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway: Abbey’s favorite railroad; near Albuquerque; Albuquerque Shops; Argentine Yard; Cajon Pass; Chanute, KS; Chanute, KS, FT diesels at; Chicagoan, at Kansas City; Chicagoan, at Lawrence, KS; Chief at Joliet, IL; Corwith Yard; Dearborn Station; dining-car worker; Edelstein Hill; 18th Street engine house; El Capitan; Emporia roundhouse; Fast Mail Express at Turner, KS; FTs at Berwyn, IL; FT engineer; Grand Canyon, at Chicago; Grand Canyon, Holliday, KS; Grand Canyon, at Joliet; Grand Canyon, at Sibley, MO; M.154 “doodlebug”; Matfield Green, KS; Oil Flyer; Oil Flyer, at Chanute, KS; Oil Flyer, at Cherryvale; Olathe Hill; PA diesels at Lemont, IL; summer job; Super Chief, at Dearborn Station; Super Chief, at Newton, KS; Super Chief, at Pasadena; “Super Railroad” story; Tehachapi Pass; Texas Chief, at Oklahoma City; track worker; train orders at Ottawa, KS; Tulsa Subdivision; Tulsan; 2-8-2 at Chillicothe, IL; Williamsburg, KS
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad: at Cincinnati Union Terminal; at Grand Central Station, Chicago; Cincinnatian at Deshler, OH; EM-1 at Cumberland, MD; washing diesel at Cumberland
Bergene, John
Burlington Northern; freight at St. Paul
Canadian Pacific
Center for Railroad Photography & Art
Central States Dispatch
Chanute, KS
Chanute Daily Tribune
Cherryvale, KS
Chesapeake & Ohio Railway: E8 at Cincinnati Union Terminal; GP9s at White Sulphur Springs, W.Va.
Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad; Cicero Yard; FTs at West Hinsdale, IL; Pioneer Zephyr conductor; 14th Street coach yards; Zephyrs
Chicago, Illinois
Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad. See Milwaukee Road
Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific. See Rock Island
Chicago & North Western Railway; Canal Street tower; Chicago Avenue roundhouse; 400 passenger trains; Iroquois (S.D.) depot; FTs, at Elburn, IL; FTs, at Kickapoo Jct., IL; FTs, at Rochelle, IL; Mayfair tower; North Western Terminal; Twin Cities 400, at Milwaukee; Twin Cities 400, at Clyman Junction, WI; Twin Cities 400, at Evanston; Viking at Devils Lake, WI
Chicago & Western Indiana Railroad: State Line Tower
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Union Station
Cincinnati Union Terminal; rotunda
Classic Trains
Cole, Ted
Dearborn Station, Chicago
Draney, John
Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic Railroad. See Soo Line
Electro-Motive FT; C&NW, at Elburn, IL; C&NW, at Kickapoo Jct., IL; C&NW, at Rochelle, IL; CB&Q at West Hinsdale, IL; Class By Itself; Erie at Maybrook, N.Y.; Santa Fe, at 18th Street engine house; Santa Fe, at Argentine Yard; Santa Fe, at Berwyn, IL; Santa Fe, at Chanute, KS; Santa Fe, at Joliet; Santa Fe, at Turner, KS; Santa Fe engineer
Englewood Union Station
Entringer, Rosemary
Erie Railroad; Hudson River car floats;Flying Saucer; Croxton Yard; FTs at Maybrook, N.Y.
Evanston, IL
Falls City, NE
Frailey, Fred W.
Fred Harvey
Frisco Railroad. See St. Louis-San Francisco
FT diesel. See Electro-Motive FT
Grand Central Station, Chicago
Grand Trunk Western: 4-8-4 at Dearborn Station
Great Northern: crossing Soo at Crystal Tower; “Mid-Century” Empire Builder at Chicago, IL; Nicollet Island Bridge, Minneapolis, MN
Griffiths, Henry R.
Gruber, John
Hale, Robert
Harkness, Vint
Harley, Tom
Hastings
, Philip R.
Hiawathas. See Milwaukee Road
Hillman, Stanley E.G.
Illinois Central Railroad: 4-8-2 at Madison, IL; caboose at Forreston, IL; freight on St. Charles Air Line; switchers at 21st Street, Chicago
Interstate Commerce Commission
Jensen, Axel
Jewett, J. M., Dr.
Jewett, Martha. See Abbey, Martha Jewett
Jewett, Mavis Laizure
Joliet, IL
Kalmbach, Albert C.
Kansas City Union Station
Kerrigan, Chic
Kooistra, Blair
Lamb, J. Parker
LaSalle Street Station, Chicago
LaVake, James A.
Lehigh & Hudson River Railroad: at Andover, N.J.
Lothes, Scott
Little Jewel, The
McElroy, Bob
McGonigal, Robert S.
McMullen, Katie
Middleton, William D.
Milwaukee Road; 4-4-2 washed at Milwaukee Shops; 4-8-4, at Elgin, IL; 4-8-4, at Rondout, IL; Baldwin diesels at St. Paul; bankruptcy; Beer Line (Milwaukee); Bicentennial diesel; Bitterroot Mountains; caboose at Forreston, IL; child in full-length dome; commuter train at Libertyville, IL; Duplainville (WI) tower; Donald, MT; Haugan, MT; Hiawathas; Hiawathas, at Chicago Union Station; Hillman, Stanley E. G.; Grand Crossing tower, La Crosse, WI; Medary Tower, La Crosse; Milwaukee Shops; Morning Hiawatha, at Grayland Tower; Morning Hiawatha, at Milwaukee; Ogilvie, Richard B.; Pacific Extension; Pig’s Eye Yard (St. Paul); St. Regis, MT; SD40-2 diesels at Lanark, IL; Skytop car; Smith, Worthington; stored diesels; switchman at Wheaton, MN; Tower A-20; Vendome Loop, MT
Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie Railroad. See Soo Line
Morgan, David P.
New York Central Railroad: Beech Grove Shops; E7 at Cincinnati Union Terminal; Hudson at Cincinnati Union Terminal; James Whitcomb Riley; New England States at LaSalle Street Station; Toledo station; 20th Century Limited at Chicago
Wallace W. Abbey: A Life in Railroad Photography Page 9
